New TV Heroines Resemble Male Psychopaths
by tts-admin | Jun 3, 2012
When inmates run the asylum…
In his book The Essential Difference, Simon Baron-Cohen, Cambridge University professor of developmental psychopathology, wrote that “the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy”.
Not on TV drama they aren’t – or not any longer. The modern television heroine is increasingly likely to act like an anti-social, obsessive male.
Or as Danish actress Sofie Grabol famously said to the writers of The Killing when they tried giving her workaholic detective Sarah Lund a love life: “I am Clint Eastwood… he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
After Lund, there was the self-medicating bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison in Homeland, picking up men in bars for functional sex, a trait shared with Swedish policewoman Saga Noren in The Bridge, a seemingly undiagnosed case of Asperger’s syndrome.
It’s a trend that is taken to its logical conclusion in Sky Atlantic’s first homegrown drama, Hit & Miss (written by Shameless creator Paul Abbott), in which Chloë Sevigny’s Mia is both a sociopath and the owner (albeit reluctantly) of a penis.
Continues in full…
